> Only a small portion of SF is matches the dystopian vision you claim. Even those portions are not any worse than other urban areas.
If you believe that you either live an extremely sheltered existence in SF or you've not visited recently.
San Francisco is pretty bad no matter where you go (except, perhaps, for the affluent areas like Sea Cliff and St Francis Woods). Out in the Outer Sunset I saw what looked like someone shat out a tapeworm over the course of three blocks the other day (if you'd like pictures, I'd be happy to oblige).
I went down to Rainbow Grocery last week and sat outside munching on some popcorn. It only took a few minutes before I was approached by a guy asking for some. Sharing food is something I've done before and will do again, but finger foods? No thanks. So the guy walks away, picks up his walking stick, gives me the crazy eyes, and then starts swinging the stick at me while muttering incoherently. This is also a part of town where you never know which side of the street you'll have to avoid due to the massive encampments (side effect of the super bowl bullshit really). Meanwhile I walked away as quickly as I could only to get hit with the stench of human shit. Turns out someone had dropped a steaming five inch mound of fresh shit nearby. The 311 ticket got closed out because they couldn't be bothered to figure out which corner if the intersection the smell was coming from (despite there being GPS coordinates in the damn picture).
I took BART last weekend to the Oakland Museum of California (the Eames exhibit was fun). I managed to get stuck on the periphery of no less than two fights on the damn trains. Last time I took BART late at night I hadn't quite realized what an open air drug market it had become. And, of course, Civic Center station has never been great but I've been seeing folks shooting up on the steps during the day. Something I never saw when I was working in that neighborhood years ago.
Backing up to earlier last week I sat next to a well traveled woman a few years younger than myself on my flight to SFO. She's from Harlem and visits SF annually. The thing that struck her most about SF vs NY was that drug use is far more open than in New York and so is homelessness. That jives with my experiences as well — San Francisco is demonstrably worse than other urban areas I've visited.
For fun search youtube for videos on sideshows. How many other urban areas get their major roads (e.g. the bay bridge, I-880) shutdown to make way for people hooning their cars? Let's not spend too much time talking about the condition of the roads out here either. They put Newark to shame. And we don't even have the excuse of extreme weather like they do in Jersey.
> There is a reason why housing here is extremely expensive. People want to live here.
That is a large part of the reason, but San Francisco is also seeing the Vancouver-like thing of rich folks parking their money in housing.
Don't forget that people often have entirely irrational reasons for wanting to live in San Francisco. Some of them have been deported from other states (thanks Las Vegas!), some of them still have a very romanticized view of San Francisco (it's not the summer of love anymore but there are plenty of kids that migrate out here in pursuit of that dream).
Some of them have been deported from other states (thanks Las Vegas!), some of them still have a very romanticized view of San Francisco
From what I gather, both of these statements are true. But it is also my understanding that our best data suggests that only about 10 percent of homeless come from elsewhere. The vast majority supposedly wind up living on the street in whatever place they last had housing in.
I'm not sure how reliable such data is. I suspect data on homeless folks is somewhat hand-wavy.
I work near Civic center and go there everyday. You know, like, Chicago has 500 murders a year. Nothing in SF and Oakland even comes close to that. Oakland used to be the crime capital in the US. People can actually live in West Oakland now. Oakland hill homes now run at $2mn. Drug use in SF has been prevalent since, what like 60s. I have been living in SF since well before the boom. Mid market and Tenderloin used to be way more troubling. I am continually amazed that they actually managed to our Uber, Twitter, and Dolby HQ there. Did you ever go to 9th and market prior to the tech boom ?
What's your point, regarding Chicago? Chicago is much larger than San Francisco; it's 5 times larger by area and over 3 times as many people. Chicago isn't one of the country's top cities by murder rate. Further, Chicago murders are largely confined to west and south sides of the city, a result of redlining, and most people in the city (even fewer professionals) don't live in those areas.
It's true, San Francisco used to have sketchy areas (I lived in Bayview in the late 1990s) and now basically doesn't, since the worst apartment in Bayview probably costs more than my house in Chicago does. Ok, you win. But the comment you're responding to is about quality of life in San Francisco. Nobody in Chicago is going to ask for your popcorn and swing a stick at you if you don't comply. We don't have tent cities on our main-drag sidewalks. The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market. We manage this despite being a larger city, with our own real pressures, and having nothing resembling the tax base San Francisco has.
San Francisco is broken. I'm sure it's fixable, but people probably need to stop pretending things are OK first.
> The CTA goes pretty much everywhere and isn't an open-air drug market.
To be fair, the antisocial behavior I witnessed on the CTA {Green Line|Red Line south of Roosevelt} and the Muni is comparable. I've never been verbally accosted by passengers on CTA like I have on Muni, but I did witness blatant pickpocketing and a drugged passenger break the bus door on CTA, which I've never seen on Muni.
For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices. Everything from opening shelters to operating mental health facilities to avoiding homelessness in the first place is easier when real estate is more affordable. (To give an example, my hometown of College Station, Texas--hardly a bastion of liberalism!--had a quite effective program for preventing homelessness in the '90s and the aughts: straight-up building enough houses to house virtually all the needy and pricing them far below market rate. This worked because of the combination of a rich suburban tax base and rock-bottom real estate prices, which would not work in Chicago or anywhere in California.) That doesn't excuse SF and the state of California from failing to better address the problems, of course.
For what it's worth, my sense is that the issues that SF has Chicago doesn't--homelessness, untreated mental illness--largely stem from cost of living differences, particularly housing prices.
My experience is that Muni itself is generally OK (yes even the 8/9, 14, and 38), but that BART has gotten really bad over the past couple years. For a while Muni stopped running the (then new) hybrid buses in the Bayview because people would hit the external kill switches when the bus was stopped.
There are a couple of California-specific and SF-specific issues at play as well. SFPD simply doesn't ride Muni, although I believe they're contractually obligated to. Meanwhile BART PD is spread very thin (around four officers at any given time for their SF stations).
At the state level, California makes it very difficult to force someone to stay on psychiatric medication or keep them in an institution. I don't believe this is as much of an issue in Illinois.
Well, I grew up out here so yes I remember things like when the Mission was a war zone and when the Embarcadero was pretty sketchy due to that elevated highway.
I worked at Sixth and Market for a few years, so, yes I think it's largely worse than it was in the early 2000s. The big tech companies haven't helped the situation by attempting to sanitize it. Getting rid of the chess players did not help anything.
The overwhelming majority of homeless San Franciscans became homeless as California residents; the notion that they're "deported" from other states (or somehow migratory) is mostly a myth.
If you believe that you either live an extremely sheltered existence in SF or you've not visited recently.
San Francisco is pretty bad no matter where you go (except, perhaps, for the affluent areas like Sea Cliff and St Francis Woods). Out in the Outer Sunset I saw what looked like someone shat out a tapeworm over the course of three blocks the other day (if you'd like pictures, I'd be happy to oblige).
I went down to Rainbow Grocery last week and sat outside munching on some popcorn. It only took a few minutes before I was approached by a guy asking for some. Sharing food is something I've done before and will do again, but finger foods? No thanks. So the guy walks away, picks up his walking stick, gives me the crazy eyes, and then starts swinging the stick at me while muttering incoherently. This is also a part of town where you never know which side of the street you'll have to avoid due to the massive encampments (side effect of the super bowl bullshit really). Meanwhile I walked away as quickly as I could only to get hit with the stench of human shit. Turns out someone had dropped a steaming five inch mound of fresh shit nearby. The 311 ticket got closed out because they couldn't be bothered to figure out which corner if the intersection the smell was coming from (despite there being GPS coordinates in the damn picture).
I took BART last weekend to the Oakland Museum of California (the Eames exhibit was fun). I managed to get stuck on the periphery of no less than two fights on the damn trains. Last time I took BART late at night I hadn't quite realized what an open air drug market it had become. And, of course, Civic Center station has never been great but I've been seeing folks shooting up on the steps during the day. Something I never saw when I was working in that neighborhood years ago.
Backing up to earlier last week I sat next to a well traveled woman a few years younger than myself on my flight to SFO. She's from Harlem and visits SF annually. The thing that struck her most about SF vs NY was that drug use is far more open than in New York and so is homelessness. That jives with my experiences as well — San Francisco is demonstrably worse than other urban areas I've visited.
For fun search youtube for videos on sideshows. How many other urban areas get their major roads (e.g. the bay bridge, I-880) shutdown to make way for people hooning their cars? Let's not spend too much time talking about the condition of the roads out here either. They put Newark to shame. And we don't even have the excuse of extreme weather like they do in Jersey.
> There is a reason why housing here is extremely expensive. People want to live here.
That is a large part of the reason, but San Francisco is also seeing the Vancouver-like thing of rich folks parking their money in housing.
Don't forget that people often have entirely irrational reasons for wanting to live in San Francisco. Some of them have been deported from other states (thanks Las Vegas!), some of them still have a very romanticized view of San Francisco (it's not the summer of love anymore but there are plenty of kids that migrate out here in pursuit of that dream).